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Charles Dickens in the Light of 21St Century Biographies Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 Charles Dickens in the Light of 21st Century Biographies Mukul SK Research Scholar (Ph.D), Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh-202002 Abstract: Dickens once said to Dostoyevsky that there “were two people in him…one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite”. Biographers put all their efforts to grasp the two contradictory personalities in Dickens. Earlier biographers—John Forster, Edgar Johnson, Fred Kaplan, Peter Ackroyd—they all contributed to shape the complex and elusive figure through their biographies. In the twenty-first century, before twenty years passes, a good number of writers have attempted Dickens’ biographies from different perspectives and angles. The biographers of the present century who gained critical acclaims are Michael Slater, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Claire Tomalin. These three new biographers also stood unique in their own ways as they each explore something fresh that has not been discovered before. The present paper aims at to paint a Dickens of twenty-first century through the three versions of Dickens architected by these three new biographers. Keyword: Dickens, biographies, Dickensian world, dark phase of Dickens’ writing, Michael Slater, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Claire Tomalin “Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens”— Claire Tomalin In 1862, Dickens had a remarkable meeting with Dostoyevsky in which Dickens told him that “All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked” (qtd in Gates 1-2). This quality of Dickens to inculcate aspects of himself into his vividly rendered characters enabled him to produce some of best-loved novels the world sees ever. It also made him an elusive and indefinable figure for biographers and scholars. And this makes the Volume XII, Issue X, 2020 Page No: 1073 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 biographer Claire Tomalin comment: “Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. The satirist, the surrealist, the mesmerist. The angry son, the good friend, the bad husband, the quarreler, the sentimentalist, the secret lover, the despairing father” (Toamlin 41). Dickens once said to his friend and biographer that he was destined to lead “that so happy yet so unhappy existence which seeks its realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual escape from the disappointment of heart around it” (qtd. In Lankford 465). He typifies the life of any artist and at the same time, continues to struggle in a world of himself. This essay examines these ‘two people’ in Dickens’ personality and attempts to shape a concrete figure of Dickens through the three new biographies. Michael Slater can be considered the first biographer who puts on a light to every corner of Dickens’ large Oeuvre in his biography Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (2009) . This has been possible for him for his lifelong study of the novelist, his sincere editions of Dickens’s journalism and his long engagement in the editorship of The Dickensian; and this gives him an unrivalled authority on the large body of works of the imaginative writer. Dickens produced 15 major novels, numerous stories, sketches and essays. He edited a number of periodicals such as Household Words, Master Humphrey’s Clock, the Daily News and All The Year Round. He was associated with a huge correspondence, and founded a house for abandoned and fallen women. He built a Guild of Literature and Art. He made himself engaged in pro- Reform and anti-Corn Law politics and served as a performer of his own literary works. Slater is one of the few biographers who leave no stone unturned as far as his literary study of Dickens’ writing is concerned. He introduces and gives fresh outlook to many unfamiliar or less- known pieces of Dickens’ writing. For example, Slater brings our attention to Dickens’ heart- touching account of testimony in the trial of a helpless farmer and his starved child where a big piece of bread was available but he was not able to eat it. Slater’s biography highlights how alert and conscious Dickens was to the touches of the pathetic episodes and how lively he immortalised them in his writing. In a book review of The Telegraph, Claire Hartman writes: Volume XII, Issue X, 2020 Page No: 1074 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 Slater’s deliberate focus on his subject’s writings necessarily leaves everything that Dickens was trying to evade or displace by his frenetic work-life – all that 'disappointment of heart’ – somewhat in the background. Unlike his subject, Slater doesn’t attempt to do any scene-setting about blacking factories or the Marshalsea. He plays down the sensational material and, remarkably, for a man whose other books include one on Dickens and women, spends as little time as possible on the great novelist’s agitated emotional life. When he does have to tackle the personal crises (or even the physical crises, such as the Staplehurst rail accident), he avoids gossip or speculation. At these points the safe pair of hands seems to don rubber gloves. Dickens’s embarrassing campaign of public self- justification at the time of his separation from his wife, for instance, is documented here, but I don’t think Slater adequately registers the turmoil it caused, the painful challenge it posed to the loyalties of his many friends and dependants, or the perplexity of his audience having their demigod address them like a deranged man. (02) The biography is an incomparable portrait of literary life of the novelist. It is deeply touching as it is chronicling a flawless interaction between the life of the novelist and his work. Slater re- captures very effectively the account which Forster, Dickens’ friend and first biographer provided him as a material needed for writing Great Expectations: “he seemed to have no care, all of that summer day, except to enjoy (his friends’ and family's) enjoyment and entertain them with his own in the shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river” (qtd. Callow 03). Slater’s biography concludes with the accounts of Dickens’ final years. It describes the third phase of his writing career and the years of his writing the last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing can be a great source for the scholars and readers of the contemporary century and will open a new path to the dark world of Dickens’ writing. Mr. Doughlas-Fairhurst is another new biographer of Dickens who has produced a Dickens compatible with the taste of the twenty-first century. While writing the biography, he argued that Volume XII, Issue X, 2020 Page No: 1075 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 trying to produce a fresh Dickens “is like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury” (Doughlas-Fairhurst 46). His biography Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011) published by Harvard University Press proves to be a considerably more revealing and groundbreaking study that gives a unique focus and insight on the early years in Dickens’ life and career. Becoming Dickens is, thus a study of Dickens’ career as a writer in the 1830s when he was seeking “to come to terms with the events that had made him into the person he was, and to work out what kind of writer he might yet become” (Doughlas-Fairhurst 104). Douglas’s work can be considered, in other words, as some kind of musing on Dickens’ early career as he freshly reminded us of Dickens’ early hazard professions in law, theatre, journalist and of Dickens’ becoming a novelist at a time when it was far more likely that he would have made his living as a journalist, or even as a professional actor, than as the most celebrated living author of his day. In his prologue, Douglas articulates that the course or path from birth to death is neither clear/simple nor direct, that our final destination is reached by such a uniquely thickened path that it cannot be virtually measured or précised. This is true, yet we forget while reading biographies and expect every phenomenon to be narrated and explained with proofs. Douglas’ Becoming Dickens takes us through Dickens early years of 1839 up to the completion of Oliver Twist, giving a double perspective; as it is capturing a young Dickens and simultaneously, is always looking forward to the mature Dickens.
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